The Complete Engraver

Nancy Sharon Collins is a New Orleans-based graphic designer who is also known for her luxurious stationery designs, which are witty, chic and thoughtful at the same time. Collins herself is something of a crusader for the art of engraving, and her fervor has produced a lively book called “The Complete Engraver: Monograms, Crests, Ciphers, Seals, and the Etiquette of Social Stationery” (Princeton Architectural Press). It combines a six-centuries-long timeline of the history of engraving and historical perspective (Collins calls the social and political commentary that was disseminated via 18th-century engraved prints “an early form of blogging”) with a primer on how to do your own engraving, and the aforementioned guide to social stationery. In the age of instant electronic communication, you might not think you need to know about the different types of mourning stationery or how to assemble a wedding invitation, but Collins spells it out for you anyway, along with the difference between a cipher and a monogram (the letters of the former don’t have to connect, while those of the latter do), or the basic components of a stationery wardrobe — all of it illustrated with archival examples of personal and business stationery as well as with Collins’s own designs. (The book also includes two fonts from Monotype Imaging that can be downloaded here.)

Collins got her master’s degree in graphic design in the mid 1970s — “pre-digital media,” as she explained. The advent of computers broke her heart. “I literally cried over it,” she said. Collins, of course, survived the heartbreak and learned to embrace the computer as a graphic design tool. Still, in the late 1990s, she had what she called “a soul-searching moment,” and started making engraved stationery as a way of satisfying “those haptic needs — the physical side of graphic design,” she said.

Collins can wax poetic about the old days, when engraved stationery was the social media of its time. There were three or four mail deliveries per day; you could invite someone for dinner that morning, and have an answer by lunchtime. Stationery, Collins said, “was like Foursquare, and calling cards were like Facebook. That’s how people communicated.” But even today, when the post office is cutting back on service and the e-vite threatens to wipe out the written variety, the revival of interest in engraving gives Collins hope. “At the end of a high-tech, low-touch day,” she explained, “people want high-touch, low-tech.”

An engraving workshop with Nancy Sharon Collins will be held on Sept. 24, at 7 p.m.–9 p.m. at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. For more information, call (718) 666-3049 or click here.

Correction: August 27, 2012An earlier version of this post, using information from the publisher, stated that Nancy Sharon Collins's current graphic design clients include Clinique and the Museum of Modern Art. They are, in fact, past clients.